'Thatcher parents' blamed for rude pupils

The generation of "Thatcher's children" who are now parents are to blame for the rudeness and poor behaviour of today's young people, says a teacher's leader.

Lack of respect for authority in school can be traced back to the "devil take the hindmost" attitude of the 1980s which bred "an inevitable rise in aggression and bullying".

Pat Lerew, a teacher for 30 years, says the profession suffered from the attitudes that developed during Margaret Thatcher's years as prime minister.

Mrs Lerew, the president of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, told its annual conference yesterday that "Thatcher's children" - now in their late 20s or 30s - held different attitudes to teachers and schools from those of previous generations.

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"Many of the current generation of parents and children in school have little respect for teachers and others in authority," she said.

"Today's parents were growing up in the 1980s, when there was no such thing as society and it was everyone for themselves; when anything that had a monetary value was sold, and anything that had no monetary value was therefore of no value.

"Teachers, who were useless anyway and therefore poorly paid, typified the failures in the success rate and were continually undermined by politicians and the media. Small wonder that the children of the day grew up with the attitudes that have now manifested themselves in their own children."

Mrs Lerew told the conference, which opened yesterday in Llandudno, north Wales, that the anti-social behaviour of young people was not confined to schools, but was a national problem.

"Unfortunately, the increasing difficulties with pupil behaviour in schools coincided with the time when the chief whipping boys for politicians and the press were teachers. We were lazy, always on holiday, only working between 9 and 3," she said.

"Sadly, despite all our efforts, we are still considered by those people who have time to write to the papers as having a 'cushy number'. Everyone has been to school so considers they know all about teaching, which makes about as much sense as everyone who drives a car knowing all about car mechanics."

The NASUWT, the second biggest teachers' union, will debate behavioural problems in schools on Thursday and call for a nationally agreed system of recording violence against school staff and an agreed list of the type of behaviour for which teachers can exclude unruly pupils from lessons.

Mrs Lerew, who teaches at Amery Hill School in Alton, Hants, said attitudes of the young towards authority were manifested in "the low level antagonism" teachers faced every day, even in schools where pupil behaviour was not considered a problem.

In an interview after her address, she said: "There are children who answer back all the time and won't take instructions.

"You ask them to be quiet and someone starts talking, and you ask them to stop and they say they didn't speak, and then they do it again and you ask them to be quiet, and they say they didn't do anything, and five minutes of the lesson have been lost.

"If you discipline a child for bad behaviour or not doing their homework, many parents come in and take the child's side and say they have done nothing wrong."

Greater informality between children and adults also played its part. "It is generally accepted, for example, that children call adults by their first names and speak to their parents and other adults in a way that would not have been tolerated when I was growing up," she said.

The wider society also played a part in setting more permissive boundaries for behaviour, Mrs Lerew added. Films and television, for example, in which violence and aggression were the norm and where anti-social behaviour was considered "cool" contributed to the "yob culture" and the increasing use of weapons.

Pupil behaviour was "the hardest nut to crack" and teachers needed the support of head teachers and governing bodies prepared to "stand up and be counted against unacceptable behaviour".